His overview of Hadoop (an open source implementation of a MapReduce framework) was equally enlightening, and I learned that Hadoop is more than the framework, but it includes a distributed file system as well. This is where I think SLAuto starts to become important, as it will be critical not only to monitor which systems in a Hadoop cluster are alive at any time (thus providing access to their storage), but also to correct failures by remounting disks on additional nodes, provisioning new nodes to meet increased data loads, etc. Granted, I know just enough to be dangerous here, but I would bet that I could sell the value of SLAuto in a MapReduce environment.

Another interesting overview of the MapReduce space comes from Greg Linden. (Damn, now I've mentioned Greg twice in a row...my groupie tendencies are really showing these days! -) Greg points us to notes taken at the Hadoop Summit by James Hamilton, an architect on the Windows Live Platform Services team. I haven't read through them all yet, but I like the breakdown of many of the big projects getting a lot of coverage among techies these days: Yahoo's PIG and HBase, as well as Microsoft's DRYAD. Missing is CouchDB, but I plan to watch Jan Lehnardt's talks [1][2] on that as soon as I get a moment.

Again, the reason MapReduce is being covered in a blog about Service Level Automation and utility computing is that as soon as I see "tens of thousands of nodes", I also see "no way human beings can meet the SLAs without automation". At least not without significant costs compared to automating. System provisioning, monitoring, autonomic scaling and fail-resistance are not built in to Hadoop, they are simply easy to support. Something else is needed to provide SLAuto support at the infrastructure layers.

About Me

James Urquhart is a widely experienced enterprise software field technologist. James started his career programming a manufacturing job tracking system on the Macintosh (circa 1991), and slowly expanded his experience to include distributed systems architectures, online community and identity systems, and most recently utility computing and cloud computing architectures. He has held positions in pre and post sales services, software engineering, product marketing, and program management for the online developer communities of one of the largest developer sites in the world. His admittedly schizophrenic background is driven by a desire to work with technologies that are disruptive, but that simplify computing overall.

James is also an avid blogger. His primary blog, recently renamed "The Wisdom of Clouds" (http://blog.jamesurquhart.com), is focused on utility computing, cloud computing and their effect in enteprises and individuals.

In addition to his online work, James is the father of two children: a son, Owen; and a daughter, Emery; and the husband of the perfect friend and wife, Mia. James lives in Alameda, CA, plays rock and bluegrass guitar.